A Very Bold Leap (13 page)

One afternoon, after having tried several times to reach Pigeon-Lecuchaux by telephone, Charles decided to go down to the publisher’s office. Montreal was in the midst of a heat wave, the first of the summer. Cats and dogs lay panting under balconies, under cars, and in any available shadowy corner, surprised and stunned by the heat. He found the publisher engaged in an animated conversation on the telephone, wearing a flamboyant short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt, and smoking a cigar. As the cigar was waved about it emitted a pleasant odour of rum and spices, as its owner completed the arrangements for his vacation in Cuba.

Charles sat down in a chair and waited patiently for Pigeon-Lecuchaux to finish, then launched into a calm but resolute recital of the concerns he was feeling for the future of his novel.

“Calm yourself, my friend,” cried Pigeon-Lecuchaux, annoyed by such a display of impatience. “Let time work its magic! Paris wasn’t built in a day, you know. With very rare exceptions, first novels take a long time to find their public. Stay calm and have some confidence in me, I beg of you. You’ll soon see what will happen, and I guarantee you’ll be delighted!”

Charles did see what happened: nothing. The articles promised by Robinard did appear — in fact, a whole string of them — but long after the book’s publication date. And in the areas where the articles appeared, the book was not available. Where the book was available, no articles appeared. Otis Editions’s distribution system seemed designed to increase poverty rather than to combat it. The brilliant, ingenious strategy devised by Pigeon-Lecuchaux had dazzled Charles’s eyes, but it had had very little effect on his sales.

Like many writers, Charles, emboldened by his own anonymity, took to checking out the bookstores to see how many of them were carrying his book. He found two copies on a small table in Parchemin Books; one copy in the Champigny Bookstore; and four at the Book Mart on boulevard de Maisonneuve, where his regularity as a customer had earned him the owner’s friendship. Everywhere else, no one had ever heard of his novel.

“It’s not in the bookstores?” said Pigeon-Lecuchaux. “What are you complaining about? That’s a good sign! If it isn’t in the stores, it’s because all the copies have been sold! What would you rather have, a pile of books in the stores gathering dust? And it doesn’t surprise me in the least that these clerks say they’ve never heard of your novel. Most people who work in bookstores are idiots who wouldn’t recognize a book if it fell off the shelf and hit them on the head! I don’t blame them, I suppose: there are so many new books coming out these days it’s enough to drive anyone off their rocker.”

In short, under the circumstances, everything was running smoothly. But there were certain other signs that made Charles suspicious. Each time he met with Pigeon-Lecuchaux, the publisher seemed to have less and less time for him, and he almost never returned a phone call.

In the end, Charles insisted that the publisher send him a few hundred copies of the book so that he could place them in bookstores himself, on consignment. Steve Lachapelle, who had just got his driver’s licence, managed to convince one of his uncles to lend him a van, and offered to drive Charles around town to distribute his books. And so, after marking their itinerary on a map of Montreal, the two set out one afternoon to conquer the city’s readers. At Charles’s request, Steve had washed his running shoes, put on a new pair of jeans, and taken the silver ring out of his right earlobe. Charles did not have to worry about his friend’s language; bookstores, which Steve never entered, intimidated him to such an extent that he was transformed into a mute pack horse.

At five o’clock they stopped at a tavern, dead on their feet but in good spirits. Charles’s easy, friendly way with people had succeeded in placing fifty books in various stores, and four sales staff, obviously swayed by his good manners, had promised to read the novel. If they liked it, they would no doubt become effective promotional agents.

“If you like,” Steve said, when Charles had paid for the beer, “we can make another round in a week or two to see if any of the books have been sold.”

“Hey, that’d be great, my friend. Let’s give it a couple of weeks. We have to give my novel enough time to find its way in the world, eh?”

Fifteen days later, the book had sold five copies. Given the lamentable job his publisher had done, selling even five copies amounted to a miracle, but the first-time novelist was crushed. Céline tried to comfort him but without much success. The combined efforts of Parfait Michaud, his wife, Lucie, and Fernand, who launched a campaign aimed at everyone they knew who could read, allowed him to off-load another fifty or so copies, but Charles continued to wallow in a disconsolate funk.

At the beginning of September he finally rallied, and decided to give it one more try; he took his book to
Le Devoir
and to
La Presse
. The books editor of
Le Devoir
was away from his desk, and Charles had to content himself with leaving the novel, with a note attached, with a secretary. But he was lucky enough to meet Reginald Martel in
La Presse’s
newsroom. Although a bit taken aback and obviously swamped with work, Martel received Charles cordially, placed the novel on a teetering pile beside his desk, and questioned him briefly on the nature of his work, pretending not to notice the state of stupefaction into which his young, blushing, and tongue-tied interviewee had fallen.

“I’ll take a look at it when I get some time,” he promised, refraining from going any further.

A month later the following notice appeared in
La Presse’s
Saturday literary supplement: “Otis Editions, a new publishing house based in Montreal, enjoyed a small
succès de scandale
a few months ago with a biography of Ginette Reno. It has now sent us
The Quiet Rip-Off
, a mystery novel by first-time Québécois novelist Charles Thibodeau. Although neither a specialist in nor a big fan of detective stories, I will nonetheless allow myself a few observations.
The Quiet Rip-Off has
a well-rendered plot and some good writing, and though not exactly original, it is still a pleasant enough read. Unfortunately, the hatchet job done by its publisher (cheap paper, laughable cover, innumerable typographical errors, grammatical and syntactical howlers, and so on) weaken the impact of a young writer who might have benefited from a firmer editorial hand, and therefore prevents us from saying with confidence whether there is any real talent lurking beneath the litter. Perhaps his next book will tell us more.”

It was Céline who brought the article to his attention, at six o’clock in the morning, enthusiastically pointing out its positive aspects. Charles, barely awake, read the notice three times without saying a word, becoming paler each time. Then he asked Céline to leave him alone for a while.

“But Charles, what’s wrong with it?” she asked, worried. “Don’t torture yourself for nothing, my poor love … It’s mostly good. Really.”

Charles’s face darkened, and for the first time since they’d known each other, he yelled at her, using some rather inelegant terms.

She didn’t see him for three days. He left the hardware store precisely at noon and shut himself up in his apartment, communicating with no one. Finally, on the third night, Blonblon and Steve, having been apprised of the situation, knocked on his door.

“Ah, just in time,” Charles greeted them, smiling. Boff leapt up and sniffed Blonblon’s shoes suspiciously, as though he had been somewhere questionable in them. “I was just about to ask you to come over. I called Céline, too. She should be here in a minute.”

“Come over for what?” Steve asked, curious.

Charles replied with an evasive gesture, led them into the kitchen, and gave them both a beer. His friends’; repeated questions evoked nothing further from him but a mysterious smile. “Wait until Céline gets here,” he told them. “Then all will be made clear.”

Céline arrived more alarmed than ever, since she had found Charles’s manner on the telephone very strange. Charles gave her a tender hug. “It’s over, my little vixen,” he whispered to her. “I’m back on earth. Do you want something to drink?”

She shook her head, wanting only to know what he was going to announce to them. But he sat at the table, still smiling, and slowly drank his beer, refusing to reply to their questions. Every so often he looked out the window, as though checking the sky. It was the middle of October, and the days had begun to shorten. A half-hour went by. For lack of anything else to do, the others talked among themselves. All three kept casting perplexed glances in Charles’s direction. Had the strain of the last few months finally pushed him over the edge?

Suddenly, after a prolonged examination of the sky through the window, Charles jumped to his feet. It was almost completely dark outside.

“I would like you all to be witnesses to a great event,” he said. “Follow me,” he added, taking a flashlight from his jacket pocket.

Behind the building in which he lived was a small, asphalt courtyard surrounded by old sheds and garages. Taking advantage of a crack in the pavement that was larger than the others, a Manitoba maple seed had somehow managed to survive and become a tree, and was now growing peacefully among the garbage cans — the only green thing to be found in the area — and a few feet from a dilapidated storage shed. They could hear its leaves, already attacked by the onset of autumn, stirring in the wind.

“Where are you taking us?” Céline asked, following Charles down the wooden stairs.

“You’ll see.”

He led them to an open space in the middle of the now darkened yard. He then stepped towards the centre of it and turned on his flashlight.

“Holy baloney, what the heck is that?” Steve exclaimed. “What are you going to do, start a bonfire or something?”

An odd-looking sort of pyre occupied the open area. It was made of books piled every which way, the spaces between them stuffed with rags that gave off the odour of gasoline. Beside it was a green garbage bag filled with more paper.

Céline recognized the books, and began to cry.

“Have you gone nuts, Charlie?” said Blonblon, pulling a copy of
The Quiet Rip-Off
from the pile.

“Quite the contrary,” said Charles. “I’ve come to my senses. And about time, too!”

He calmly explained to his companions that after giving the matter a great deal of thought, he had come to the conclusion that he hadn’t a single iota of talent as a novelist; that Reginald Martel had seen the truth and could have been a lot crueller than he was; that his pathetic excuse for a publisher had in fact done him a favour by producing such a shoddy product, because it meant that very few readers were now aware of how he had wasted his time writing it — and that was why he now had to rid the planet of this wretched book. Hence the funeral pyre.

“I know it’s just a symbolic gesture,” he added with a bitter smile. “There
are a few copies still in the publisher’s warehouse, but in two or three months the last of them will have been either pulped or tossed into the garbage bin. And good riddance to them! Remember this,” he finished, with a rhetorical flourish that made Blonblon smile. “Each time a bad writer stops writing, humanity breathes a little easier.”